


A Mark on the Horizon

by BlackEyedGirl



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Episode Related, F/M, Jolly Roger - Freeform, Pre-Het, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 22:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/803866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackEyedGirl/pseuds/BlackEyedGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neither of them will be getting any sleep tonight. So Hook steers and Emma asks a few of her questions. [Spoilers for 2.22]</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mark on the Horizon

**Author's Note:**

> For snoozin81, for Five Acts, 'gentleness'.

“You really should get some sleep, you know.”

Hook glances away from where his eyes have been fixed, some point on the horizon that Emma can’t make out. His gaze rakes over her unapologetically. “I could say the same.”

Mary Margaret and David are in a bedroom which she can only assume is Hook’s; Regina is pacing about below in much the same way as Emma had been five minutes before; Emma doesn’t know what Gold is doing, and isn’t sure she wants to. Hook, though, hasn’t moved from the wheel since they got here. He has been watching the clouded sky as though he’s waiting for something to happen. Emma hasn’t seen another ship, but she’s sure that there are shadows moving in the water below.

Emma says, “Yeah, well I know why _I’m_ not sleeping. You, I think you’re just waiting to fall asleep at the helm and crash us into some rocks or something.” It’s so dark here. She hadn’t expected that – dark far longer than any night should be. 

He smiles then, sort of. “My ship won’t wreck with me in it. But forgive me for not sleeping easily with-.”

“Gold on board,” Emma fills in.

“Yes,” he says. “That. Also there is, as you say, the matter of steering.”

“David could-.” 

Hook exhales roughly. “Your father is a swordsman, perhaps, and he’s no mean shot. But he barely has his sea-legs, and you want me to trust him with-?”

“I thought she wouldn’t crash with you in her?” Emma counters. Still, he has a point. David doesn’t like Hook much, but he’s been deferring to his instructions in how to take this thing where they need to go. Emma stands beside Hook and looks down. “What’s this?” There’s a weird scratch below the steering wheel, an N-shape.

Under his breath, Hook laughs. “You would go right for the throat, wouldn’t you?”

“Sorry?” she asks.

He touches her shoulder, just enough to point her in the right direction. “Port is left, starboard right.” He taps the letters, just visible underneath the marks.

“Okay? And who have you had onboard who didn’t already know that? Before now, I mean-” She stops. “Neal.”

“Well,” he says. “He wasn’t going by that name back then. But yes. Baelfire.”

She can’t help it. They hadn’t talked about it. She had been more interested in Neal’s recent past, the one he could have spent with her, than the parts between him running away from Gold and turning up in their world. There hadn’t been a lot of time. “You’re the one who taught him to sail.”

“Aye. An instrument of my own undoing, it turns out.”

“Did you... Did you know him long?”

Hook shrugs. “By whose counting? I’ve lived a while and he spent his own time in Neverland. Time moves differently here, lass, so you better be prepared for that.” He looks up again at the still-dark skies.

“But long enough to remember him,” she persists. She remembers his expression when she told him what had happened.

“Yes,” he says. “Long enough for that.”

There’s someone else moving about on the deck now, enough noise that she can hear it, though quiet enough that they’re probably trying not to be noticed. Emma lowers her voice, just a little. “He was one of the-?”

Hook tilts his head. “He was lost, yes, but when I knew him he wasn’t one of them. That came later. When I knew him he was only...”

“What?”

He smiles. “Fierce. He had about as good opinion of pirates on our first meeting as you did. Angry too. He’d been on his own a while, and you could tell that within a minute of speaking with him. Things vanished around him, small things, coin sometimes but mostly food. You would find it squirrelled away somewhere about him, as though anyone on my ship would have let him go hungry.” He trails off. “But then we both know a little about what a person might do to ensure their own survival.”

“Yeah.” Emma rubs her eyes. “And then you came back anyway.”

“Yes.” He says it simply, like it hadn’t been in question, when the sight of his ship coming back into the harbour had seemed as much like magic as anything else Emma had seen in Storybrooke.

“Why?”

“Does it matter?” he asks.

“These people have my son.”

“I know. And I seem to recall that the last time your Henry was in danger, _I_ was the one left handcuffed at the top of a beanstalk.” She starts to interrupt him but he keeps talking. “This time, how about you and I try something new?”

“You used that line before.”

“Yes. I meant it that time too.” 

Mary Margaret says that Emma’s lie-detection goes to shit when she’s emotional. (Though she said it a bit more tactfully than that.) If that’s true, then this is no time to be trying to work out how sincere Hook is being right now. Emma still believes him. He came back, and there was nothing in that for him. He could be anywhere right now, free and clear. Instead, he’s sailing the seas of a world that visibly unnerves him, with a man he wanted to kill until yesterday, and a pinch about his eyes from not sleeping. Emma has been thinking that through for a while, and she can’t see a way it benefits him. She says, “There’s a first time for everything, I guess.”

He raises his eyebrows. “There is indeed.”

That seems to run out the words between them. He looks back down at Gold’s magic blood globe-compass-whatever. That’s their fixed point, the place Henry is. It doesn’t tell her what’s happening to him. 

Hook shifts his feet, so that she barely notices that his shoulder is leaning into hers. He says, “We’ll find him.”

“I know.” They can’t not. Emma can’t think of a world, any world, without Henry in it. So she focuses on that. “They _really_ picked the wrong kid to steal. I mean, my parents - not the kind of people who give up on their grandchild without a fight. Gold’s got... he literally tore his world apart to get Neal back. And Regina and I aren’t exactly pushovers on the making questionable decisions for our son front.”

He smiles at her. “And me?”

“Aside from the fact that you actually know where you’re going? You fought your way out of this place before, right?”

“I did.”

“So I bet even the apparently-not-a-good-guy Peter Pan is going to think twice when he sees this ship coming for him.”

“I believe you may be right.” 

“I know I’m right.” Emma has read Henry’s book. She knows that even in the Enchanted Forest there were plenty of unhappy endings. But she didn’t need the book to tell her that. This story, though, is going to come out okay. She trusts in that, the way she is starting to trust in a few other things. Emma puts her fingertips to the side of Hook’s face and turns his chin. “And on the note of things I’m right about: you need to sleep.”

His eyes stay locked on hers but she doesn’t look away. He says, “When we find your son, and not before.” He reaches his own hand up and brushes her hair back to behind her ear, where the wind had carried it loose. He leans down, so his forehead touches hers. “That’s a promise, love.”

Emma closes her eyes. When she opens them again she looks at the skies behind him - there is light blooming where the sky meets the sea. This night is over, and the sun is finally rising. Emma spots something else. “What is it you say here?” she asks, trying for what feels like her first smile in days. “Land ho?”

Hook turns around quickly, reaching for his telescope. He looks at the island for a long moment. His answering grin, when it comes, is sharp. “Well, Swan, it seems as though you were right.”

“About what?”

“They’re running scared.” He puts his arm over her shoulder to let her see through the telescope. “As well they should.”


End file.
